Seagate has decided to get in on the action with products catering for users with portable storage needs. Over the past few years we've seen the influx of portable storage devices such as pen drives which many of couldn't do without in our day to day lives. Who doesn't want 1 and 0's in their pocket for convenience? Read on as we take a close look at both products and then put them through their paces and see just how they perform.

Seagate's new line of palm-sized USB "Hi-Speed" (2.0) pocket drives come in sizes of 2.5GB and 5GB. Different from typical pen drives, the Seagate pocket drive is not solid state storage (in other words, doesn't use writeable memory) but an actual hard drive.

The hard drive spins at a virtually silent 3,600 RPM and includes 2MB of cache to help boost performance. Even with the drive held close to your ear, not a sound could be heard - dead silent. Given these facts, this pocket drive is not your typical pen drive type device and should perform much better in terms of read and write speeds. We'll take a closer look at this shortly.

As we said, the pocket drive connects to your computer via USB 2.0 which is capable of transfer speeds up to 480 Mbps (around 60MB/s). The USB cable is retractable and curls up inside the drive, making it seem even more like a yoyo. The clear center part of the unit includes a blue LED which flashes when the drive is active, which is another nice touch.

The unit itself is made of tough plastic and feels quite solid and like it wouldn't break if it were dropped on the ground. In fact, Seagate are making big claims about the durability of the drive if dropped saying the shell absorbs the majority of the shock - we didn't try any drop tests though and we wouldn't recommend using it as a soccer ball as you're still working with a device with moving parts.

The good thing about this drive is that it only uses up to 5 volts of power which means an external power adapter is not required since the USB port can provide all the power it needs. Weight of the drive is a non-issue as it only weighs 2.2 oz which is only a little heavier than a large cigarette lighter.

The 5GB "yoyo" pocket drive from Seagate is an interesting product which is certainly unique in design and works well for what it was intended. While bigger than all other pen drives, you do get around 150% more storage space than the largest traditional pen drives which are around 2GB in size at the moment. 5GB of storage is enough to hold around 1,700 MP3's or over 12,000 digital images and at least half a dozen full length movies.